


Miracle Girl

by kearlyn



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: (maybe) overtones of the Force as religion, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, BAMF Jyn Erso, Gen, Jyn Erso Appreciation Squad, Jyn Erso has a tough life, Jyn Erso-centric, Rogue One Lives, Team as Family, mostly linear narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-21
Updated: 2017-07-21
Packaged: 2018-12-05 02:54:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11568822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kearlyn/pseuds/kearlyn
Summary: Jyn Erso is born with a band of black around her left wrist. Most people never make it to their last Miracle. They never see the black band on their wrists. The Force never runs out of Miracles to give them.For Jyn Erso, who’s only Miracle was a rescue from a childhood fall and who’s lived through more death and pain and strife without a single Miracle to help, living life with a wild, reckless abandon and a will of durasteel is the onlykriff youshe can send to a Force that never seems to have meant for her to live at all.





	Miracle Girl

**Author's Note:**

> This was a bit of a weird writing process for me. I wrote the first half in a couple day writing binge, then came to hate the idea, then came back to it when I was looking for something for the Jyn Erso Appreciation Squad. Turns out that a month away from the work helped me see that I still liked it! I don't feel 100% solid on the world-building, but here it is :)

Jyn Erso is born with a band of black around her left wrist.

The first one to see it is the nurse, gently cleaning the child of the residue of her birth. It takes a moment for the nurse to realize the grim truth laid out before her. Before she can figure out how to respond, Lyra Erso, exhausted but still sharp, sees the expression on the nurse’s face.

“What’s wrong?” she demands, pushing herself half off the bed.

Her husband lays a calming hand on her shoulder, but his expression is just as worried. The prison officials let him be with his wife during the birth of their child. It had seemed like a kindness at the time.

The nurse can only shake her head and carry the newly dried infant to her parents.

“I’m so sorry,” she says. She tries not to get emotional about her patients; they’re prisoners, after all. But even she is not cold-hearted enough not to offer sympathy in the face of this kind of news.

With shaking hands, Lyra touches the band around her daughter’s wrist.

“Galen,” she whispers, “what do we do?”

The nurse backs quietly out of the room before Galen Erso can respond.

The couple deserves their privacy while they try to come to terms with their daughter’s fate.

 

 

It’s fitting, Jyn thinks sometimes, that she was born in a prison on a frozen world.

It had been a marker that, from the very beginning, the Force had nothing good in store for Jyn Erso.

 

 

When she is six years old, during the Erso family’s first weeks on Lah’mu, Jyn falls down a steep hill and breaks her left arm in two places. Her family has little in the way of medical technology and doesn’t yet feel confident interacting with the sparse population that lives many miles from their farm, so Jyn spends several long, uncomfortable weeks wearing a plastoid cast while her arm heals.

Jyn’s parents fuss a great deal over her and for a while, Jyn enjoys it. Mama and papa have been so tired and scared and busy that they’ve had little time for Jyn, and Jyn appreciates having their full attention.

For a little while at least.

But she quickly begins to find their attention to be too much weight. They are always watching her and never let her do anything fun. Even papa, who usually let her do whatever she pleased (especially when he drifted into thinking about _big ideas_ ), wouldn’t even let her climb on the counter to get the cookies down from the top cupboard.

Jyn is deeply frustrated by the end of the third day.

She can’t wait for everything to go back to normal.

When the cast comes off three weeks later, the black band around Jyn’s wrist is gone.

Jyn doesn’t understand why this makes her mother cry.

She’d never liked the band. She’d never liked the way it looked against her skin or the way the other children at her primary school had laughed and whispered or the way adults had always gone strange when they caught sight of it.

She’d never liked how looking at it sometimes made her mother’s face go hard or made her father cry.

So when they both stare at her blank wrist like the world is ending (again), Jyn demands to know what all the fuss is about.

It is only then that her parents explain what the band had meant, and what its absence means now.

 

 

Every soul, they tell her, is blessed by the Force. The Force loves her children and when she can, she will step in to protect them from harm. The Force grants each person a number of these Miracles in their life.

But even the Force has limits, and there will come a point in every person’s life when they are granted their last Miracle.

The black band is the Force’s way of signaling this to a person. Your next Miracle, the band says, will be your last. So make it count.

When the band disappears from your skin, you know your last Miracle has been spent.

 

 

Contrary to what her parents think, Jyn isn’t confused by their explanation about black bands and Miracles of the Force. She knows exactly what it means. She’s out of Miracles; she only ever got the one and it’s all gone. There are no more Miracles for her. She knows that.

She just doesn’t understand it.

“Why did I only get one?” she asks at dinner a week later. “One Miracle,” she adds, so that they don’t think she’s asking about the one cookie she got for dessert, though she’d certainly like more of those.

The glances her parents share with each other makes unease curl in Jyn’s tummy.

“We don’t know, stardust,” papa says.

“Most people get more, though, right?”

Her parents trade another glance, then nod reluctantly.

“That’s why I had the band,” Jyn says. “Because I only ever got one Miracle.”

“It makes you special,” mama says. “Most people aren’t born with the band. Only a really really small number.”

“You’re one in a billion,” papa says.

Jyn smiles because she knows they are trying to make it seem like a good thing. (Even though she doesn’t think it is.)

“But why did I only get one Miracle?” she asks. No matter what he parents try to tell her, she doesn’t buy that being born black-banded is good. Not with the way everyone always looked at her funny or sad because of it.

“It’s the will of the Force,” mama says finally with a sigh. “We must trust it.”

Her tone is final and Jyn knows that the subject is closed. But it doesn’t make her question go away.

The only answer she can think of is that the Force just doesn’t love her the way it loves everyone else.

 

 

Watching the man in white kill her mother in the rain-soaked fields of her family’s farm, Jyn realizes that you can still die, even if your Miracles are not all spent.

The Miracles are just a taunt from the Force. _I could have saved you, but I didn’t_.

The kyber crystal is a weight around her neck and her mother’s words — _trust the Force_ — burn in her ears.

Jyn is glad, for the first time since she learned the truth of her absent band and absent Miracles, that the Force will have no further say in her life.

 

 

People go cautious after their last Miracle is spent, acutely aware that there are no last-minute saves coming, no miraculous rescues from certain death, no extraordinary luck that puts you exactly when and where you need to be. They get scared and finally start to think about their own ends.

Most people never make it to their last Miracle. They never see the black band on their wrists. The Force never runs out of Miracles to give them.

For Jyn Erso, who’s only Miracle was a rescue from a childhood fall and who’s lived through more death and pain and strife without a single Miracle to help, living life with a wild, reckless abandon is the only _kriff you_ she can send to a Force that never seems to have meant for her to live at all.

 

 

That doesn’t mean that Jyn is stupid. The ever-present knowledge that this is the only life she has — that her Miracles are long long gone — makes her push harder. She masters every weapon Saw puts in her hands and wields them with brutal efficiency from the moment she picks them up. She learns explosives and slicing, how to plan a raid and how to pilot a ship, when to fight and when to run.

(She’s not very good at that last one.)

To Jyn, everything is a fight, and every fight is one she intends to win.

She has only herself — the strength of her arm and the cunning of her mind — to rely on.

There will be no Miracles of the Force and no last minute saves for Jyn Erso.

 

 

In her first weeks with Saw, she sees a man thrown from a tavern into the streets. He picks himself up from the dirt slowly and staggers away down the street. As he passes them, Jyn sees a hint of black around his wrist. Despite the narrow, crowded streets, the town’s inhabitants give the man a wide berth, pressing against buildings and each other to leave a clear open space around him.

Jyn turns to Saw to ask him about it.

The question dies on her tongue when she sees the narrow-eyed, thin-lipped expression on his face as he stares at the man’s retreating back.

 

 

Sometimes she thinks about that first (only) Miracle she was granted and is blindingly, incandescently angry that she spent it on something so petty as falling down a hill. If she could have saved it, she thinks, maybe she could have saved her mother or kept the man in white from taking her father.

(She knows you don’t get to decide when you spend your Miracles.)

At sixteen, she wonders if a Miracle could have brought back Saw.

At eighteen, starving in a filthy alley, she wonders if a Miracle could save her from having to sell something she doesn’t want to just to survive.

At twenty-one, she wonders if a Miracle could save her from a prison sentence (a death sentence).

At twenty-three, she wonders if a Miracle could have saved her father.

Jyn has needed so many Miracles in her life, and never gotten a single one.

 

 

She sees a man once, the wealthy son of an Imperial Governor who’s never wanted for anything in his life, pick up a random coin off the floor of a casino, take an absent pull of the closest slot machine, and win enough credits to set himself up for life ten times over.

 _A Miracle of the Force_ , his lackeys cry as he wallows in the attention lavished on him.

Jyn feels sick to her stomach and doesn’t regret for a second the Partisan bomb that kills his father the next day. She’s twelve years old.

 

 

Sometimes, rarely, she is glad that she used her only Miracle so young. It means that there is no black band marking her skin, no indicator telling the world that Jyn Erso is out of Miracles.

There is nothing to tell those that see her that she is not like everyone else: living life with an uncounted number of Miracles still waiting for her.

It means that, in this at least, Jyn can be the same as everyone else in the universe.

 

 

The boy’s blood is a thick, blue ichor, spilling onto the dusty streets of Arris 7 as Jyn drags him back to the Partisan’s temporary base. They are the only survivors of a poorly planned attack on an Imperial convoy.

Jyn doesn’t expect the boy to live.

His blood already soaks both their clothes, and he passed out of consciousness almost 10 minutes earlier. But on the off chance that he _does_ live (Jyn doesn’t let herself think of the word _Miracle_ ) she can’t risk leaving him behind for the Imperials to find.

Until then, though, she drags him, but with every step she keeps her eyes open, cataloguing the nearby alleys, shattered buildings, and piles of refuse where she might dump the body when he finally stops breathing.

There are no funerals or solemn burials for Partisans, and Jyn has her own life to think of.

But he doesn’t stop breathing and Jyn doesn’t stop carrying him and somehow they both make it back to the Partisan base.

The boy is whisked away to be pumped full of what little medical supplies they have available. And he lives. And they call his survival a Miracle, talking in hushed voices throughout the base about the Force. _It’s a Miracle he survived,_ they say. _The Force was watching over him. The Force saved him._

Jyn wants to scream. _I saved him,_ she thinks. _The Force didn’t carry him back, I did._

She doesn’t say anything, but in her heart, she reminds herself again that it’s her own strength that will save her, not the whims of the Force.

She is fourteen years old.

 

 

She never tells Saw that she’s out of Miracles and he assumes, like everyone else, that she has many more waiting for her, that the Force is not yet done with her. For all that Saw believes in making his own fate, he still values the Force and its Miracles.

He cautions her once, after she barely avoids execution by a lucky stormtrooper patrol, to be more careful and not waste her Miracles. She almost tells him then that there are no Miracles for her, that she survives because of a durasteel will to live no matter what the Force intended for her.

She doesn’t say anything, and three weeks later Saw abandons her in bunker with only a blaster and a broken promise for company.

 

 

Jyn doesn’t even know what planet she’s on now. Hunger gnaws on her belly as she staggers through the streets. A flicker of light catches her attention and she glances up to find a colorful billboard blazing on a nearby rooftop.

 _Your Miracles were given to serve the Empire_ , it proclaims

Jyn sneers at it and stumbles on.

 

 

Jyn makes the mistake of telling someone else about her lack of Miracles only once. She’s nineteen and just found a crew that’s willing to take on an angry slip of a girl who knows little about cargo hauling and a lot about fighting. The crew is flush from their first job together and downing shots of the navigator’s homebrew, sharing stories of the rough situations they’ve only escape by virtue of a Miracle.

When it’s her turn, Jyn throws caution to the wind, the buzz of alcohol in her blood and tentative companionship of this new crew filling a hole in her that’s ached since Saw abandoned her.

She tells them that she only ever had one Miracle and used it as a child, that every scrape she’s ever gotten out of has been because of her wits and stubbornness and training.

At the next port, the captain hands Jyn her tiny bag of effects and her cut from the shipment, and tells Jyn she’s not welcome back on the ship.

They’re not religious, the captain says, but they can’t have someone on board who’s so clearly been abandoned by the Force.

 

 

In her darkest moments in Wobani, Jyn thinks about giving up. Every day in this prison is a fight, a desperate struggle to claw and punch and kick your way back from the edge of death. People run through Miracles _fast_ here.

Jyn, who has no Miracles to pull her back from the edge, has to fight twice as hard, and she is tired.

But fighting is a habit worn deep into her bones, and a habit is a hard thing to break.

So Jyn fights on even when her mind longs for rest.

(She wonders, sometimes, if the Force is out there laughing at her, laughing at the little girl who thought to defy its will and _live_.)

 

 

She lives and lives and lives and lives.

Through Wobani and Jedha, a fire burning in her belly.

It’s easier to fight, she thinks, when there is something to fight _for_.

She lives through Eadu, even when she sees the Force fail _again_ to give her a Miracle.

And though she spits fire and anger at Cassian and he shouts right back, she thinks this might be the end for her.

But the fire has not gone out. There is still her father’s mission.

She can do that. She can fight for just that much longer.

 

 

Jyn expects to die on Scarif. Kneeling on the beach with Cassian’s arms around her waist, Jyn thinks that this is it. This is the moment that even her tenaciousness can’t make up for the Force’s lack of care.

She strangely content with it.

She doesn’t _want_ to die, but she feels better about dying with her father’s mission accomplished. That even without the Force’s Miracles, she’s managed to accomplish something worthwhile with people who’d wormed their ways past the barriers around her heart without her even noticing.

Cassian’s body is warm against hers and the weight of his head on her shoulder, the press of his scruff against the skin of her neck, is a warm comfort. If she’s finally going to surrender her last life to the Force, at least she won’t do it alone.

 

 

They don’t die.

It’s not her Miracle that saves them. It’s Bodhi’s and Chirrut’s and Baze’s and Cassian’s, all coming together to give them a ship that can barely fly, but can be in just the right place to pluck Jyn and Cassian off the beach.

Cassian’s laugh is a little crazed as they collapse into the ship’s hold and Bodhi plunges the ship upwards into a rapid flight from the wave of destruction behind them.

Bodhi joins in, even though he’s still fighting at the ship’s controls and wearing burns down half his body. Chirrut’s laugh is exhausted and Baze’s rusty.

Jyn can’t manage even that.

She’s not supposed to be here, she thinks.

It took at least four Miracles to get the rest of her crew through this.

No-one got off that beach without a Miracle, she thinks. No-one except her.

She’s not supposed to be here.

For the first time, that thought doesn’t make her rage at the Force. Instead, it’s a cold weight in her belly, a stark reminder that the Force, in all its infinite strength, had never intended for Jyn Erso to make it this far.

_She’s not supposed to be here._

 

 

She’s not supposed to be here.

The words have become a mantra that explains so much of her life these days.

She’s not supposed to be part of the Rebellion. It’s in Draven’s eyes as he watches her sign the official paperwork and accepts her oath of service.

She’s not supposed to be in the Med Bay. The droids tell her this again and again and again, that she should be resting herself instead of spending every waking moment (and most of the ones she’s meant to be sleeping) shuttling between the bedsides of her injured team.

She’s not supposed to be alive. The toll this mission has taken on her team is ferocious — broken bones and battered insides and burned outsides. All four of her boys have been cycling through the Rebellion’s limited bacta supply in the Med Bay staff’s desperate attempt to keep them all alive and fighting.

And Jyn, who has no Miracles? Jyn escapes with nothing more than minor bruises and cuts.

It’s not fair.

She’s not supposed to be here.

 

 

At the bottom of a cabinet in the far corner of Bodhi’s recovery room, Jyn finds a flimsi for medical personnel titled _How to Deal with Patients Who’ve Used Their Last Miracle_. Through a thick coating of dust, Jyn sees an image of a man hunched over and sobbing while a doctor holds his shoulders with pity and solemn grief written on every line of her face.

Jyn puts the flimsi back in the cabinet and slams the door harder than necessary.

 

 

She should tell her crew, she thinks. She should tell them they’re flying with a dead girl, abandoned by the Force.

She thinks about telling them while they’re still stuck in Med Bay and discussing in hushed voices their Miracle survival.

She thinks about telling them when the Death Star is destroyed above their heads.

She thinks about telling them when Senator Mon Mothma approves Rogue One to remain together as a field unit.

She thinks about telling them on the first mission, the second mission, the third mission.

She thinks about telling them, but never does.

 

 

She thinks that Chirrut might know.

Most days, Jyn can listen to Chirrut talk about the gifts of the Force without flinching. She can even take comfort in the steady rise and fall of his words — the way they wind themselves into her subconscious to the point where she finds her hands matching the cadence of his prayer as she cleans her weapons.

It’s steadying in a way she hasn’t had since her mother’s death and those last days on Lah’mu.

Most days.

The first time that Chirrut really talks about Miracles, Jyn gets up and walks out before her mind even has time to properly process.

Her crew is concerned, when they find her later, and she can’t remember what excuses she gives but she knows that they don’t believe them.

The second time the subject comes up — during an avid discussion between Chirrut and the Skywalker boy — Jyn tries to stay, she really does. She makes it through most of the discussion before she has to flee, focusing on a blaster calibration instead, but she has to redo all her work later.

It never gets better.

But Chirrut talks about the Miracles only rarely and for her friend’s sake, Jyn tries not to let her discomfort show. (And if part of that is to protect her secret, well, she’ll only admit that to herself on her darkest days, and she certainly won’t admit it to anyone else.)

She thinks though that he might know. There’s a certain, almost knowing, sadness in the way he looks at her that makes her wonder. He never teases her with his devotion to the Force and is never angry when that devotion sometimes becomes too much for Jyn.

But if he knows about her lack of Miracles or if he just senses the roiling feelings Jyn keeps locked inside, he never says and Jyn doesn’t ask.

 

 

During a mission to Arranis, Jyn meets, for the first time in her life, another child wearing a black band. The little girl is the daughter of their contact, herself the wife of the Imperial governor. She keeps her daughter close and tells them with quiet anger that her husband has already cost her daughter almost all the Miracles she would have had. That she wants her husband dead to preserve what’s left of her daughter’s life.

Her daughter is silent, but there’s a fierce fire burning in her gaze that Jyn knows well. It’s the same fire burning in her, a fire that will do whatever it takes to defend what’s hers, regardless of what the Force has planned. Jyn and the girl child watch each other and they _know_ what they both are.

The rest of the crew are sickened by the sight of the black band around the girl child’s wrist and there is much conversation about it. Even Cassian, for all his decades in the Rebellion, can barely fathom the idea of a child living with the weight of mortality so close.

Jyn says nothing, _can_ say nothing, but silently promises herself that she will see this child away from the war and give her a chance to _live_ and kriff what the Force wants.

It doesn’t help.

Two days later the little girl gives her last Miracle and her life stepping in front of a blaster shot aimed at her mother.

Objectively, the mission is a success. The governor is dead and the planet’s fledgling rebellion is growing quickly. But Jyn cannot scrub from her mind the sight of the little’s girls lifeless body cradled in her mother’s arms as the black band faded from her wrist.

 

 

In her first weeks with the Rebellion, while she is still recovering from her injuries on Scarif and trying to find her place, a Pathfinder comes back from a mission without the black band they were wearing when they went out.

It’s the talk of the base for days.

How the man used his last Miracle to save himself and his team. Everyone is awed by him and treats him with grateful respect.

For a few days, Jyn thinks that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to tell her crew. That maybe here in the Rebellion being without Miracles isn’t as bad as it is in the rest of the galaxy.

Then she walks in on the Pathfinder have a screaming row with his pilot wife. She wants him to retire from the field, take up a desk job. He doesn’t want to give up his work with the Rebellion. She tells him he’s being selfish, risking his life when there are no more Miracles coming.

Jyn leaves before the argument goes any further, but apparently she wasn’t the only witness because it’s all the base can talk about for the next few days.

“He’ll probably take the desk job,” Cassian says when Bodhi cautiously brings up the subject, asking about the different ways the Rebellion and the Empire handle Miracles. “No one will force him, but, well. Without Miracles most people move to an on-base post where it’s safer. Or get assigned to a suicide mission because there’s no chance of them surviving to be captured by Imperials.”

He must catch the shocked look on Jyn’s face because he shrugs, looking suddenly uncomfortable.

“For all our morals, the Rebellion is a practical place,” he says.

It shouldn’t surprise Jyn as much as it does, but somehow she’d thought the Rebellion would be different from the rest of the galaxy. She never again considers the possibility of telling her crew about her lack of Miracles.

 

 

It comes to a head during a scouting mission to Geonosis. Jyn sees a stormtrooper sight his blaster on Cassian’s unprotected back and reacts without thinking. She doesn’t feel the shot sear into her abdomen until she hits the ground, limbs tangled with Cassian’s and his body warm underneath hers. She feels him move and hears the whine of his blaster but all she can concentrate on is the pain and the scorching sun on her face and the sand under her cheek.

Distantly she hears Cassian call her name. He rolls her gently onto her back. For a moment, the blazing sun blinds her then Cassian’s face looms over hers.

“Jyn!” he calls.

One of his hands presses against the wound in her stomach and the world goes away for a while.

When it comes back, the sounds of battle have begun to fade and Cassian is staring down at her. His face looks pale, even in the shadow cast by the sun at his back, and his eyes are wide.

“Jyn, stay with me,” he says. One of his hands tightens around her shoulder. “Stay with me. Please.”

“Still here,” she whispers. Her voice is barely a whisper and she can’t seem to get air into her lungs.

Something lightens in his face and his free hand, the one not pressing his jacket against her wound, finds hers and laces their fingers together.

“Stay with me,” he says.

Jyn tries to tell him that she will, that she’ll never leave him the way he never leaves her, but she can’t force the words out. The world goes dim around the edges and Cassian’s voice grows distant. She doesn’t know how long she drifts like that, caught in darkness flaring with agony.

She resurfaces to Cassian’s voice.

“-yn! Jyn! Wake up! Jyn!”

She tries to reach up, to tell him she’s okay, but her body won’t obey her commands. She forces her eyes open and blinks until his face comes into focus.

“Jyn,” he says, and his hands are framing her face. His palms feel warm and rough against her clammy skin. “Jyn, you need a Miracle. Please. You need a Miracle.”

It doesn’t make sense at first, but then she realizes what he’s asking for. A Miracle from the Force. For her.

He doesn’t know.

The laughter bubbles up from under her breastbone, spilling out of her mouth in harsh, wheezing gasps. She can taste the copper tang of blood on her teeth.

“No Miracles,” she says.

“What?”

She can’t tell if it’s a question because she can’t make the words come out or genuine shock and she finds she doesn’t care. She wants him to know — needs him to know — before she dies.

She manages to make an arm work and reaches up to tangle her fingers in Cassian’s shirt collar. She has no strength to tug him down, but he follows her hand.

“Jyn,” he whispers, desperate and pleading.

“No Miracles,” she says. “Don’t have any left. Only had one and —“ She pauses to cough, hacking and wet. She can feel wet blood trailing down her chin. “Used it. A long time ago. No Miracles of the Force for Jyn.”

She pauses and gasps for air. She doesn’t see the realization come into Cassian’s eyes, but she can feel it in the way his hand shake and the way he curls his body closer to hers.

“Jyn.” His voice shakes; her name is a breath of wind on his lips.

She gathers herself; she’s almost out of strength, she knows, but she has one more thing to say.

She reaches a hand up and presses it against his cheek, clumsy and shaking. He catches her hand before it falls; her fingers leave streaks of blood against his skin.

“There are no miracles but what we make for ourselves,” she says.

It’s the truth she’s carried since she was a child, a truth honed by decades of pain at the hands of the galaxy and a Force that doesn’t care for Jyn Erso.

 _You made me believe in Miracles again_ , she wants to say and maybe she does but the world is fading and the dark is rushing in. But Cassian is there and she thinks she can maybe forgive the Force for making sure she didn’t die alone, even if it gave her nothing else.

 

 

She wakes up. Alive. Again.

The shock of it sends her right back into unconsciousness before she can process what that means.

 

 

Cassian is sleeping at her bedside holding her hand.

It’s the first thing she realizes when she finally manages to remain conscious for more than a few seconds.

The second thing she realizes is that there’s an oxygen mask over her face, an IV in her arm, and the white ceiling of the Alliance medbay above her hand.

She doesn’t think she’d be able to talk, but she manages to muster up the energy to squeeze Cassian’s hand. He comes awake with a start, blinking blearily before zeroing in on Jyn.

“You’re awake,” he says, and Jyn has to smile.

“How are you feeling?”

“Alive,” she tries to say, but the words won’t come out of her mouth.

She wants to ask what happened, but her throat is too dry and her brain feels too fuzzy. Her question must show in her eyes, because Cassian answers.

“We got you back to the ship and off Geonosis. A Miracle from Bodhi,” he says. “Mine kept you alive until we could make it back to base.”

There is censure and worry (and maybe fear?) in his voice and Jyn braces herself for _that conversation_ where she finally has to talk about her lack of Miracles. She doesn’t want to do it, especially not from a medical bed, but she’s trapped here and if Cassian wants to have that conversation there’s nothing she can do to stop him.

He doesn’t though, even if he clearly wants to.

He just squeezes her hand through the inevitable prodding by the medical droid and feeds her ice chips until she falls asleep again.

 

 

They have the fight eventually. Cassian waits until Jyn is recovered enough to be discharged from medbay, but cheats and makes sure the entire crew is there. They meet in the hold of their battered cruiser and they’re all there, but Cassian is the one who talks. The one who paces and clenches his fists and allows the passion he so deeply feels but rarely expresses to leak into his voice.

“Why didn’t you tell us?!”

“Why would I?” she shouts back, finally frustrated enough to stop watching her words. “So you could send me away, like everyone else? So you could find me something _safe_ to do? So you could look at me like I’m some strange anomaly? So you could pity me?”

Cassian stumbles back, his mouth open and eyes wide. “I wouldn’t—“

“Everyone else has,” she says, plowing forward relentlessly. She’s in too far to stop now. “Every time, it matters. It matters to everyone, and don’t pretend it doesn’t. I’ve seen the way the galaxy treats people without Miracles, and I don’t want it.”

“Jyn,” Cassian says.

“I don’t need Miracles,” she says. “I’ve gotten by for 15 years without them.” Cassian flinches and Jyn plows on. “I make my own destiny. I survive because of _me_ , not the Force. But no-one out there can ever accept that. Even the _Rebellion_ can’t accept it. So tell me it doesn’t make a difference.” She plants her fists on her hips. “Tell me it doesn’t matter.”

Cassian mutely shakes his head.

There is a long, fraught silence from the crew.

“It _does_ matters,” Baze says, “because you did not let it end you. You are still here, and it makes everything you’ve done that much more worthy of praise.”

Jyn blinks and her mouth falls open. Coming from Baze, that’s almost gushing. Chirrut must catch the feeling of her expression, because he smiles knowing at her and pats Baze on the knee.

“My husband speaks the truth,” he says. His eyes turn unerringly to Jyn and she finds herself pinned by the cloudy blue of his gaze. “The Force gives you nothing more or less than you can handle.”

Jyn barely refrains from rolling her eyes, but doesn’t feel the same sharp stab of anger that usually accompanies thinking about the Force.

“You make it work,” Bodhi says, smiling tentatively when Jyn’s gaze turns to him. “We’ll make it work.”

“The statistically probability of you surviving this long, living the way you do, is less than 0.0001%,” Kaytoo says. “That you have survived despite these odds is…” Kaytoo pauses and his sensors flicker. “In keeping with your character.”

It startles a huff of laughter and a smile out of Jyn.

She turns to Cassian and raises an eyebrow at him. He’s the only one left.

He meets her eyes with the same steady he wore on Scarif, ready to face down the end of the world without flinching.

“You are still the same Jyn you were before we knew,” he says slowly and she smiles at him. “I cannot say I won’t worry more, but it won’t change who we are and what we do. I won’t let it.”

 

 

In the end, finally telling her secret doesn’t end up changing all that much in Jyn’s day to day life.

(She only has to give her crew —her family — a couple good talking to’s and strong looks when they forget, for a moment, that she is fully capable of taking care of herself. Bodhi, surprisingly, is the worst.)

She still goes on missions, she still throws herself into danger, she still faces the universe with weapons in her hands and fire in her heart.

(Maybe she doesn’t hate the Force as much. It gave her Cassian and Bodhi and Chirrut and Baze and even Kaytoo, and that’s a miracle in and of itself.)

 

 

She still believes in making her own Miracles.

**Author's Note:**

> With this work, I've officially crossed 100,000 words of fanfic shared with the world. It's... a bit mind-boggling.
> 
> I don't know how I feel that my 100,000th word is an innocuous verb. ("Had" if you're curious.)
> 
> But it does deserve a celebration. So if anyone has prompts for any of the fandoms I write in that they want to see me tackle, send them to me on my tumblr at thekearlyn.tumblr.com


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